Flaw of Averages recap and INFORMS podcast

I talked about an article about Sam Savage and his new book the Flaw of Averages not too long ago. This past Friday INFORMS released a new podcast in their series the Science of Better interviewing Sam Savage. This is a fascinating interview about the theory in his book and the, unfortunate often, over simplification of decision analysis based on a simple average of a data population. I strongly suggest listening to this podcast as Sam has a unique way of presenting his theories.

Legal issues with Data Visualization: AT&T and Verizon "Map For That"

CmdrTaco of Slashdot has a recent entry on AT&T sues Verizon over "Map For That" Advertising. CmdrTaco has a good point in that this story is about a lawsuit over data visualization. Sure there has been litigation in the past with false advertising. Yet this lawsuit is pointing to a topic that Operations Research practitioners take a great interest.

Data visualization is often seen as a great tool for comparison. I remember first seeing this TV ad from Verizon and thinking how amazed the difference in coverage between the two carriers. Data visualization can have a great impact on the recipients of the information. Often times the contrasts can be very startling. In fact so startling to AT&T that they are willing to sue over the data visualization chart by Verizon.

If there is anything to learn from this is that Data Visualization might be more important than we take for granted in Operations Research. As practitioners we often are trying to determine ways to improve our soft skills to help implement our ideas to management. Data Visualization can be a great tool in our tool bag to help deliver important results to the decision makers. Perhaps software applications could be developed to transfer output results of an optimization program to a data visualization chart. I am starting to get more interested in Data Visualization the more I think about it.

GLPK 4.40 released today

Andrew Makhorin, lead developer of the GNU Linear Programming Kit project, released the latest version of GLPK 4.40 today. Some of the following enhancements include...

• New API routines. Mostly with graphs.
• New branching and MIP heuristics
• And of course some bug fixes

As described by Andrew, GLPK is intended for solving large-scale linear programming, mixed integer linear programming, and related problems. GLPK is written in ANSI C and is organized as a callable library.

IEOR Tools also had a feature on GLPK on how to use it in the Windows environment as IEOR Tools tutorial: Using GLPK in Windows.

IBM to open health analytics center in Dallas

IBM is opening a Health Analytics Solution Center in Dallas, TX as announced by the Dallas Morning News. It will employ 100 analytics and technology consultants in the regional area.

This is an interesting deal for Dallas as it may have ramifications for EDS and Perot Systems, Dell's new aquisition, which are both based in the Dallas area.

Yet from an Operations Research and Analytics point of view the most interesting excerpt from the article is this...

IBM did not specify how much it would invest in Dallas, but it plans to invest more than $10 billion companywide to build its capabilities around business analytics. As part of the plan, the company expects to retrain or hire up to 4,000 new analytics consultants globally.

IBM's Business Analytics and Optimization segment is expected to grow at around 10 percent this year, and to between 15 and 20 percent from 2010 onward, accounting for more than $2 billion in sales in 2010, Haswell said.

The field of Analytics and Operations Research is definitely growing which is a good sign. If IBM's projections are accurate than they could be perhaps the premier Analytics and Operations Research company worldwide. This is a trend by IBM that was seen early this year as it acquired ILOG. As a whole for Operations Research and Business Analytics it seems this is a good time to be in the field.

Operations Researcher predicts Yankees to win World Series

Bruce Buckiet of NJIT predicts that the Yankees are going to win the World Series as covered by Science Daily. Bruce's model predicts a 70 percent chance that the Yankees will beat the Phillies. You can follow Bruce's predictions on his website http://m.njit.edu/~bukiet/baseball/playoffs09.htm. Bruce has game to game predictions for the best of seven series including the probably outcomes of each possible starting pitcher.

Baseball is no stranger to Operations Research. Michael Trick is a member of the Sports Scheduling Group that assists MLB in scheduling their games for the past three years.

IBM to use Operations Research for war on terror

According to a report from BusinessWeek IBM has won a contract with the U.S. Special Operations Command to apply their analytical analysis. There is a long standing of tradition of the U.S. military using Operations Research to help optimize its operations, as the article alludes.

More interestingly that this article demonstrates is that IBM is increasingly becoming a go-to company for Operations Research services. This no doubt is an objective of IBM as a whole with their recent ILOG aquisition. I would be willing to bet that there will be more interesting news from IBM in the future.

The perils of a data-driven culture at Google

Techradar.com has an article about Google's culture of being data-driven decision making and its affect on the visual and user experience teams. In fact it had such a big affect on the former Visual Design Lead, Douglas Bowman, he left the company. Techradar interviews Google's Director of User Experience Irene Au. Irene explains the importance of data and how Google's culture emphasizes experimentation which may rub some designers the wrong way.

I've never really thought of being a data-driven culture could have its drawbacks. As an analyst I see only the merits of having data. But there are people who like to think way outside the box and not agree with me. This could be a good thing to learn as an Operations Research practitioner. There are definitely some soft-skills we could learn to help implement our data-driven ideas in our respective organizations.

There is one thing that I didn't agree with from Irene Au in the article. Here's here quote from the article...

"That's why we have a significant team of designers who bring unique skills to the teams they work with. Data informs decision-making but it's less useful for conceiving and building conceptually new directions. It's most useful for optimising and refining an established concept."

While I agree it's good to get other people's ideas to the table I do not agree on how data is less useful for conceiving and building new concepts. Maybe I'm taking her a little out of context but I could argue how data can help shape new ideas of thinking. I've done that a lot in my career. In fact the whole field of data mining pretty much defines this as their objective.

I definitely think there could be things to learn from examining the cultures of the organizations we work. Implementing Operations Research ideas and recommendations can be difficult. Perhaps it takes examining our organization and finding how others define optimality.